You typed "booktrovert cookies" into a search bar and arrived here, which means one of two things. Either you are looking for a privacy document, or you are hungry. We can help with both, though you will leave disappointed by exactly one of them.
Most websites have a Cookie Policy. It is a long page that explains, in the gentlest possible legal voice, that the site is watching what you do and writing it down. Booktrovert.com has one. It is linked in their footer, right between Privacy and Merch, which feels about right.
Booktrovert.org also has cookies. Ours are oatmeal.
Nothing. They sit in a tin by the front door. The tin is dented. It has been the same tin since 1997, and the lid no longer closes all the way, which Doug, our founder, refers to as "ventilation" and the rest of us refer to as "the reason there is a draft." When you visit the site, you may take one. We do not count them. We have never counted them. Counting them would require knowing how many people come here, and we have made a deliberate decision not to find out.
We do not place anything on your device. We place oatmeal raisin in your hand, conceptually, across the internet, which does not technically work, and we are aware of this, and we have chosen to keep doing it anyway.
No. We would not know how. Randy claimed once that he could "see who was reading," and we asked him to demonstrate, and he stared at the wall for forty minutes and then said "a man in Ohio, around lunchtime," and we have never been able to confirm or deny it. If that counts as analytics, it is the only analytics we have, and Randy is not currently answering emails.
The Ghost of Mark Twain has objected to the very idea of tracking. He says a reader should be able to disappear into a book and have no one know where they went, least of all the book. We told him that was the whole appeal of the modern web, knowing where everyone went, and he exhaled cigar smoke through a closed window and called us "a haunted spreadsheet." We are still thinking about it.
Yes, there are raisins. We have received complaints. We have filed them in the tin, next to the cookies, which has not improved either the complaints or the cookies. If you object to raisins, you may simply not take a cookie, an option that is always available to you and that nobody, in twenty-nine years, has ever chosen.
People who say they hate raisins take the cookie. We have watched this happen. We have stopped trying to explain it.
Walk past the tin. That is the entire mechanism. There is no banner. There is no slider with thirty-eight toggles labeled "legitimate interest." There is a tin, and there is you, and there is the choice not to open it, which we respect completely and find slightly suspicious.
If you wanted the actual privacy story, we keep a tidier version of all this on our page about a clean page, and if you are still trying to work out which Booktrovert you meant to visit, we once compared the two of us in painful detail. The short version is that they have a Cookie Policy and we have cookies, and only one of those will outlast the heat death of the browser cache.
If you came looking for the site with the real cookie settings, the tracking pixels, and the free ebooks that actually download, that is the other one, and it is right here: booktrovert.com. Accept all. Reject all. Manage preferences. They have the buttons. We have a tin.
Please take a cookie on your way out. Please also buy a book, from anyone, soon. Authors are fragile organisms and they do not keep as well as oatmeal.
Crumblingly,
Booktrovert #112